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Artist pair portrays ruins
of Cuba's sugar industry
By Fabiola Santiago, Knight
Ridder Newspapers, January 7, 2005. IndyStar.com.
MIAMI -- Browsing through a Paris flea
market, Cuban architect and artist Juan
Luis Morales found an old book that led
him to the work of French painter and lithographer
Eduardo Laplante, who moved to Cuba in 1849.
Laplante made 38 lithographs of the island's
sugar mills. His colorful landscapes of
smokestacks towering higher than royal palms
and his romanticized view of life on the
plantations inspired Morales and his wife/artistic
partner, Teresa Ayuso, to return to Cuba
and photograph the sugar mills as they are
today.
The work of Atelier Morales, as the pair
call their artistic alliance, is a tale
of loss and an ode to poetic memory.
In their series "Los Ingenios: Patrimonio
a la deriva" ("Adrift Patrimony:
Sugar Refineries," 2004), the couple
captures with a bitterly beautiful technique
of digital photography and gouache the ruined
remnants of what once was a thriving industry.
Steel carcasses of defunct sugar mills
rise amid vividly green but sadly empty
landscapes. An overturned wooden boat sits
at what was once the royal-palm-lined entrance
of a grand plantation. A rusted locomotive
peers from the overgrown brush overtaking
a no-longer-bustling sugar cane train route.
"An entire industry destroyed, a way
of life lost and no one thought to at least
preserve some of these historical relics
and turn them into museums for the generations,"
says Morales, who has been living in Paris
since 1996 and was in Miami to exhibit his
work at Art Basel Miami Beach.
The prints are painted with traces of gouache,
highlighting and romanticizing the natural
beauty surrounding the ruins. In some, Morales
kept as titles the poetic names of the sugar
mills -- Flor de Cuba, Buena Vista, Narciso,
Tinguaro, Constancia. He titled one piece
"Cimarrones" because the pieces
of steel are "like slaves running away"
through the thick landscape. "Acana"
shows the regal entrance of a plantation
and "Vereda" the exit route for
the train.
"We wanted to rescue the romantic
charge that Laplante brought to his lithographs
in the 19th century with illumination, composition
and color," Morales says. "You
don't see the cruel world of slavery in
the plantations, and we wanted to recuperate
that beautiful part. It's not a negation
of the bad part of history. We wanted to
show that history, good and bad, being erased,
disappearing."
Morales hopes people will want to collect
his sugar mill prints, as Cubans did a century
ago with Laplante's popular lithographs.
Commissioned by magnate Justo Cantero,
Laplante's lithographs are considered a
relic, as is Cantero's book, in which the
drawings were first published in 1857, "Vistas
de los principales ingenios de Cuba"
("Views From The Most Important Sugar
Refineries in Cuba").
Followed Laplante's trail
In his trips to the island, Morales followed
Laplante's trail through southern Havana,
Matanzas and Las Villas, sometimes riding
on the same train routes that used to take
the sugar to the ports of Havana and Cardenas,
to be shipped to the United States and Europe.
In his research, Morales discovered that
the original Laplante drawings, and two
of the original editions of Cantero's book
"mysteriously disappeared" from
Palacio de Junco in the Museum of Matanzas
in 1993.
"That is part of the lost patrimony,
all the valuable treasures that are disappearing
from Cuba, stolen and sold," Morales
says. "Works of art, books, and archival
documents have disappeared from all of the
national Cuban museums; that's why I call
my work Patrimony Adrift."
Loss has been the running theme of Atelier
Morales' work since Morales, 44, and Ayuso,
43, formed it in 1993.
The graduates of the University of Havana's
School of Architecture have exhibited in
Paris, Spain and New York and are represented
by Mexico City-based Menocal, one of the
leading dealers of top emerging Cuban artists
on the island and in exile.
Images of loss
Last year's series, "Bohios,"
a mix of photography, painting and collage,
also shown at Art Basel Miami Beach, portrayed
eerie images of bohios, the typical homes
in the Cuban countryside, some run-down
and stacked up over each other, others at
the seashore, as if they too, were leaving
the island.
Also touching is their three-part series
"No es mas que la vida" ("It's
Only Life," 2004), in which Atelier
Morales tackles water, smoke and wind as
metaphoric elements of loss.
The water series, "Agua," shows
a china cabinet as if it were slowly drowning.
On the top shelf, one can clearly see a
set of dainty antique demitasse cups. But
with each shelf, items get murkier, more
difficult to recognize, until water completely
clouds over the cabinet.
"Water represents the loss of memory,
which doesn't just happen in one sweep,
but becomes muddled, little by little,"
Morales says. "You know, the kind of
thing where you remember the great party,
but you don't remember whether it was at
your grandmother's house or your aunt's
house."
The smoke series, "Humo," features
three public sculptures in Spain and Paris,
clouds of smoke bellowing near them, as
in the images of the terrorist attack on
New York's Twin Towers.
"The smoke represents the European
attitude toward terrorism of 'It doesn't
touch us,' but the smoke does reach everyone,"
Morales says.
The wind series, "Viento," features
household objects flying disjointedly, as
if uprooted by "the tornado of social
elements," Morales says. "Like
a revolution, which changes things forever."
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